Jessica Helfand

The Cushing Portraits:

The American neurologist Harvey Cushing used photography as a clinical tool, taking before-and-after pictures of his patients for more than thirty years. Thousands of these images, housed in the Cushing Brain Registry at Yale School of Medicine (and most of which have never been seen) form the basis for series of paintings I am making that bring what is unseen—but visible—to light.

Liberated from the dispassionate gaze of the medical archive, these photos serve as the primary source material for a series of oversized portraits, some of which maintain careful fidelity to their subjects, while others, for a variety of reasons, do not. Artists have long invoked interpretive choice when working with appropriated images, particularly with photographs—so why is this collection any different? Does editing these faces protect them or exoticize them, obscuring realities or embellishing the truth? And whose truth? And who gets to decide?

These are the questions that both fuel and frame this work. The people here are anonymous, yet their expressions are universal: time has neither dimmed their power nor diminished, in any way, their remarkable poignancy. Our stories outlive us.

Which is the entire point.

Painting is the act of bearing witness: adding dimension, shifting focus, and in the case of a certain kind of photo-based, adaptive portraiture, reasserting dignity. An anonymous subject is not a lost subject, but a noble one, with the enduring humanity that we can’t help but recognize as our own. Today, more than a century since the camera was deployed to produce what was, in all likelihood, a methodical diagnostic record, a more human narrative beckons. For me, this is a practice uniquely made possible by painting.